This article titled “China imposes tariff on US car imports” was written by Graeme Wearden, for The Guardian on Thursday 15th December 2011 01.39 UTC

The tension between America and China over international trade escalated on Wednesday when Beijing imposed additional duties on cars imported from the United States.

China’s commerce ministry accused America’s car industry of “dumping and subsidising”, thereby causing substantial damage to China’s domestic car industry. From Thursday, levies will be charged on larger-engined cars from several manufacturers, some being European firms with factories in the US.

General Motors faces the greatest impact, almost 22% extra on some sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and other cars with engine capacities above 2.5 litres. Chrysler faces a 15% penalty, while a 2% levy will be imposed on BMW, whose US plants make many of the cars it exports to China.

Existing taxes and duties already push up the cost of US imports by 25%, and the new levies make it even more expensive for Chinese consumers to buy American. The move was swiftly attacked in the US. Carl Levin, the Democratic senator for Michigan (which includes the motor city of Detroit), called it an “unjustified” attempt to circumvent international trade laws. “Instead of ending its unlawful trade practices, China is choosing to take further steps that are unauthorised by world trade rules,” he claimed.”The livelihoods of American families and the integrity of global trade law are at stake.”

GM says the levies will have little immediate impact, as it mostly exports lower-power cars to China. Analysts, though, said the decision underlined China’s determination to protect its car industry.

“The move shows that China is always capable of intervening politically in its markets,” Juergen Pieper of Bankhaus Metzler, the German investment bank, told Bloomberg. Georges Dieng, a Paris-based analyst with Natixis Securities, said the levies had been set to “inflict pain on the Americans, above all”. Shares in General Motors fell by over 3%, while BMW’s shares slipped 5%.

China and the US have peppered each other with legal actions and tariffs over the past few years.

Earlier this month, the US International Trade Commission ruled against China’s solar-power industry after an anti-dumping and anti-subsidy investigation. Last week, the US pledged to take China’s anti-dumping measures against American poultry imports to the World Trade Organisation.

Debbie Stabenow, the junior senator for Michigan, urged the US government to take China’s car levies to the WTO as well. “China relentlessly breaks international trade rules, and seeks to gain an anti-competitive advantage over our companies and workers. America must be equally relentless in fighting back,” she said.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

They promise not to target “small businesses” so it’s okay. Screw the big retailers. F*ck all the employees that work at those companies, right? These people are a disgrace. Why would we want to destroy the successful retailers in America? Is that supposed to help the economy? These people are Marxist morons. We don’t owe them shit.

Ex-AMEX CEO Harvey Golub says his grandson has a better understanding of Capitalism than President Obama.

The LA Times has a good piece today about Barack Obama’s class warfare rhetoric disappearing and then reappearing depending on his audience. At $35,000 per ticket fundraisers with evil millionaires and billionaires the president doesn’t mention anything about the “Buffet rule” or ask the attendees to “pay their fair share.” But in front of $100 a ticket crowds he goes back to railing about the rich and calling for new taxes on them.

Barack Obama is a cynical left wing politician so I’m not really surprised. The sad part is that millionaires and billionaires would still line up to give him money which will directly fund his goal of taking more of their money. It’s bizarre world we live in.

(H/T Weasel Zippers)

(image via Flopping Aces)

This dude gets it. Period. The best part is when he keeps antagonizing that liberal academic next to him. He scribbles notes refuting her testimony and passing them to her. LOL!

(H/T Conurls)

This article titled “Banks under new pressure as ‘rogue trader’ loses $2bn” was written by Jill Treanor, for The Guardian on Thursday 15th September 2011 20.20 UTC

Pressure to accelerate reform of the banking industry is mounting as a star trader at the UBS investment bank remained in police custody in London amid allegations that he was at the heart of a rogue trading incident that has cost the Swiss bank about $2bn (£1.2bn).

Kweku Adoboli, 31, faced a night of questioning by officers from City of London police after being arrested at 3.30am when his managers became suspicious about his trading activities and alerted police and financial regulators. Police said he was being held on suspicion of “fraud by abuse of position”.

Adoboli’s father, a retired United Nations employee from Ghana, told Reuters in Accra that his “Godfearing family” was “heartbroken because fraud is not our way of life”.

John Adoboli, who had worked in trouble spots around the world, said his son’s girlfriend had confirmed his arrest. Adoboli Sr said he was calling his son’s phone and he hoped he would “be granted bail soon so I can hear his side of the story”.

The Nottingham University graduate’s arrest coincided with the third anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and sparked a 10% fall in UBS’s shares as it warned it might make a third-quarter loss.

Days after the government pledged to endorse ringfencing ideas put forward by Sir John Vickers’s Independent Commission on Banking, senior political figures used the UBS incident as ammunition to encourage reform. Lord Oakeshott, the former Lib Dem Treasury spokesman in the Lords, said it exposed the “toxic banking risk” still in the system. Lord Myners, Labour’s City minister during the banking crisis, warned taxpayers were still on the hook should a UK bank fail.

UBS, which had been fighting to restore its reputation after it became one of the biggest continental European casualties of the 2008 banking crisis, alerted City of London police at 1am on Thursday after it uncovering alleged “unauthorised trading” in the late afternoon and embarked on a wide-ranging internal investigation.

City of London police arrested Adoboli at the sprawling UBS office complex near Liverpool Street in central London, where around 6,000 people are employed. “The man was taken to a City of London police station for questioning and he remains in custody while officers are continuing to investigate this matter,” police said.

The allegations facing Adoboli follow a series of rogue trading incidents in the financial markets. Nick Leeson is perhaps the highest profile after he was jailed in Singapore for bringing down Barings Bank in 1995 but there have been many others, including Yasuo “Mr Copper” Hamanaka and Jérôme Kerviel, a trader at Société Générale, whom the French authorities sentenced to three years in prison last year after he ran up losses of €4.9bn. Kerviel is appealing against the sentence.

Adoboli now risks entering that list if charges are brought against him. The bank would not confirm his position at the bank but his entry on LinkedIn, the social networking site, described him as director of exchange traded funds (ETF) and delta one trading at UBS.

This operation, in the equities division on the third floor of the UBS head office, was known internally as a profitable – and risk free – area of business. But it is understood that the trading desk was largely silent on Thursday

Staff were said to be stunned as Adoboli and his colleagues were regarded as “stars” by their colleagues and top management.ETFs are complex financial instruments that comprise a basket of investments intended to mimic a market’s movements. They have become an area into which firms have expanded since the subprime mortgage crisis. Traders on so-called delta one desks try to make huge profits on tiny differences between prices.

The Financial Services Authority, the City regulator, is understood to have been alerted in the early hours and Swiss regulators were watching the situation closely.

The Serious Fraud Office may also become involved after it said it was “seeking discussions” with the bank, the City of London police and the FSA about how to proceed if fraud needed to be investigated. The SFO had already issued a warning about the “inherent dangers” of ETFs because of their complexity.

UBS is expected to reveal more details on Friday about the allegations facing Adoboli but the City was rife with speculation that he had been caught out by the sudden move by the Swiss National Bank last week to lower the rate of exchange of the Swiss franc.

On 6 September, the Swiss National Bank warned that it would no longer allow one Swiss franc to be worth more than €0.83 – equivalent to SFr1.20 to the euro. “The Swiss currency moved by 8% straight away which is a huge move for foreign exchange markets.

Probably a good guess as to where the loss came from, but at the moment we do not know,” said Louise Cooper, analyst at BGC Partners.

Amid concerns about the health of Europe’s banking system, Oakeshott told a debate on the Vickers reforms in the Lords that “this reminds us how much toxic banking risk remains in the system, and how urgent radical reform is”.

He added: “The problem is that big investment banks are full of rogue traders: it is what they do.”

Lord Myners, Labour’s City minister at the time of the banking crisis, told the Guardian: “Until this government does something – either Vickers or Vickers ‘plus’ – the taxpayers remain on the hook.”

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Here is some bombshell testimony from an ex-employee of Obama’s green jobs fantasy known as Solyndra. The woman says even before the plant was built it was widely known that China had already developed a cheaper method of building solar panels. But the Obama folks went ahead and poured $500 billion in tax payer doe into it anyway. It was a company doomed for failure before it even opened. Sounds like fraud to me.

I wish a politician from either party would finally be honest with the American people about manufacturing. The manufacturing jobs in this country are gone and they are not coming back. We will never be able to compete with China on manufacturing. It’s simply not possible for the US to ever produce something cheaper than China. The idea that any politician is going to create manufacturing jobs here in America is a myth. It’s not going to happen.

The sooner we come to terms with that fact the sooner we can rebuild our economy on something besides manufacturing.

It was only last week I posted a video of one of these union jerks using his daughter as a human shield, and now we have this. Striking Verizon workers are camped out in front of the private home of a Verizon VP. They have a massive inflatable rat at the end of his driveway. The union thugs are screaming into a bullhorn and revving motorcycles. If I were that Verizon executive this would harden my position even further. These assholes would get a new contract over my dead body. I would never give in. I wouldn’t care if they took up residence at the end of my driveway, they would never get jack shit from me.

The absolute worst thing Verizon could do would be to give in to this kind of behavior. All it does is legitimize this kind of thuggery and intimidation.

Also, I can’t see how this is legal. There has to be some kind of neighborhood ordinance or city ordinance that would put a stop to this. Why should the neighbors have to put up with this kind disturbance in their neighborhood. It’s likely illegal to block a persons driveway too.

From WSJ:

A cornerstone of the global financial system was shaken Friday when officials at ratings firm Standard & Poor’s said U.S. Treasury debt no longer deserved to be considered among the safest investments in the world.

S&P removed for the first time the triple-A rating the U.S. has held for 70 years, saying the budget deal recently brokered in Washington didn’t do enough to address the gloomy outlook for America’s finances. It downgraded long-term U.S. debt to AA+, a score that ranks below more than a dozen governments’, including Liechtenstein’s, and on par with Belgium’s and New Zealand’s. S&P also put the new grade on “negative outlook,” meaning the U.S. has little chance of regaining the top rating in the near term.

…A key concern will be whether the appetite for U.S. debt might change among foreign investors, in particular China, the world’s largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasurys. In 1945, foreigners owned just 1% of U.S. Treasurys; today they own a record high 46%, according to research done by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

The downgrade from S&P has been brewing for months. S&P’s sovereign debt team, led by company veteran David T. Beers, had grown increasingly skeptical that Washington policy makers would make significant progress in reducing the deficit, given the tortured talks over raising the debt ceiling. In recent warnings, the company said Washington should strive to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years, suggesting anything less would be insufficient.

And far left loons like Paul Krugman continue to argue that America should spend even more money.

This article titled “Iran revolutionary guards commander becomes new president of Opec” was written by Saeed Kamali Dehghan, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 3rd August 2011 21.44 UTC

A senior Iranian revolutionary guards commander targeted by international sanctions has taken over the presidency of Opec after he became Iran’s oil minister on Wednesday.

Rostam Ghasemi, head of the Khatam al-Anbia military and industrial base, was one of four ministersnominated by president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to join his cabinet last week and approved by Iran’s conservative-dominated parliament.

Ghasemi is currently subject to US, EU and Australian sanctions and his assets have been blacklisted by US Treasury and western powers. He took 216 votes from the 246 deputies present in the 290-seat parliament.

Iranian state media interpreted the vote as a reaction by Iran’s parliament to international sanctions against the country, especially those which have targeted the revolutionary guards and the country’s nuclear programme.

“The clever and decisive vote of Iranian MPs for engineer Ghasemi to become the oil minister is a meaningful and crucial response to the attacks against the guards from the west’s media empire,” said Ramedan Sharif, the head of the revolutionary guards public relations’ unit, in quotes carried by Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency.

In a parliamentary debate before the vote, however, Ali Motahari, a prominent conservative MP who has previously threatened to impeach Ahmadinejad, spoke out against the involvement of the revolutionary guards in Iran’s politics.

“The integration of the guard, as a military force, in political and economic power is not in the interests of the system,” Motahari told the parliament. “In neighboring countries, military officials are distancing themselves from politics and power, while it’s the opposite in Iran.”

The appointment of Ghasemi as Iran’s oil minister automatically makes him the head of Opec which has a crucial role in determining oil prices.

As its second-largest crude oil exporter, Iran took the presidency of Opec after 36 years last October and Ghasemi’s position will give the revolutionary guards a unique opportunity to influence an international organisation.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010